Don't give up on the Final Fantasy XV rumors just yet

If you recall, right before E3 there was a certain leak that said that Final Fantasy Versus XIII was going to be renamed to Final Fantasy XV, and hailed as the next numbered game in the series. These rumors were false, as were the ones that Versus XIII is canceled (thankfully), but it seems like the rumors that a FFXV is indeed in the works are still much alive.

According to this post on GameFAQs, a magazine called GamesMaster UK revealed some interesting concepts behind the supposed upcoming Final Fantasy XV. ​This is the excerpt.

Hello, GM. I remember your rumour from back in your December 2011 issue where you said Final Fantasy XV would be announced at E3 2012. Was the game you were referring to the Agni's Philosophy tech demo?

As far as we're aware, Agni's Philosophy is not FFXV. Perhaps we should further clarify the rumour. An extremely trustworthy, industry source who has successfully tipped us off on Square Enix news in the past (such as FFXIV being announced at E3 2009, FFXIII being announced for Xbox 360 at E3 2008 and the FFXIII Compilation being announced at E3 2006) told us in November 2011 that FFXV is currently deep in development at Square Enix Japan and will release on all major current gen platforms. He said that he was 90% sure the game would be announced as part of Final Fantasy 25th anniversary. It was us that predicted that the place of the announcement would be E3. He only told us a vague, "Next year, as part of FF 25th anniversary." What that means is that it could still show up at Tokyo Game Show in September.

Further details revealed in bullet points are pretty cool too, and should definitely get FF fans fairly excited:

Including the concept planning and pre-production phase, the game has already been in development for over 4 years.

It entered full production in January 2010, a month after FFXIII was released in Japan. Since then it has had a development team of just over 200 people.

The director is the same person who directed FFVI, FFIX and FFXII.

The co-director led a small part of the development team to make Tactics Ogre for the PSP in parallel with FFXV. He's currently multi-tasking as lead UI designer of FFXIV 2.0 and co-director of FFXV.

The game design and battle system will be a major evolution of FFXII.

The game will be open world and have sprawling, crowd-filled cities on par with Assassin's Creed.

The battle system now allows you to target different parts of an enemy’s body like in Vagrant Story.

Yoichi Wada (president of Square Enix) wants the game to have a world scale and volume of content that surpasses The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. He also wants the game to surpass FFVII in worldwide sales and critical reception.

Of course, best proof of this would have been a magazine scan, rather than just written words, but alas, this is all we have to go on. Should you be skeptical about it? Absolutely! None of this has actually been confirmed at all (and the above picture isn't real either).

Even though, if any of this is true, I think I can safely say that at least Square would be heading in the right direction for Final Fantasy. ​I'm all about innovating the franchise and something like an open world could give the series a fresh new gameplay perspective. Come on, let these rumors be true!